Slow Drinks
Slow Drinks teaches home cooks, industry pros, homebrewers, and foragers how to transform botanical ingredients—whether foraged or purchased from the store—into incredibly unique beverages and cocktails.
Organized by season, Slow Drinks demonstrates how to make drinks that tell a story of botany, history, culture, and terroir, while honoring beverage traditions both old and new. Each season will highlight eight new ingredients with recipes that build on a basics chapter and teach readers how to interchangeably use master recipes to make their own meads, country wines, beers, sodas, tinctures, shrubs, and more.
Beautifully photographed by the author’s wife, Katie Childs, and illustrated by Molly Reader, Slow Drinks will be the definitive botanist’s guide to mixology that can live in your basket on a foraging trip, or on the coffee table as a conversation piece.
This book is for bartenders, do-it-yourselfers, foodies, homesteaders, homebrewers, food activists, and anyone looking to dive into the world of botanical drink making.
Available where good books are sold.
Praise for Slow Drinks
“You can feel [Danny Childs’] excitement in [his] beautiful field guide to botanical cocktails, Slow Drinks. The straightforward recipes mostly rely on plants considered weeds or other foraged ingredients—and they build upon one another . . . And while the book has plenty of recipes for alcoholic beverages, it also contains recipes for enticing non-alcoholic drinks—from spiced hibiscus syrup (for a hibiscus soda) to elderflower kombucha.” - Civil Eats, “Our 2023 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide”
“The green thumb of your social circle will fawn over this botanical beauty. And whether they’re just an entry-level home bartender or a seasoned homebrewer, the tips and tutorials created by ethnobotanist Danny Childs will have them feeling entirely equipped to pickle, ferment, and forage their way through the seasons and the drinks they demand.” - VinePair, “The 14 Best Booze Books to Buy This Holiday Season (2023)”
“[Slow Drinks explores] the great outdoors through foraged ingredients and culturally significant stories about the land, and how these components come together to create hand crafted cocktails.” - Philadelphia Magazine, “The 2023 Foobooz Holiday Gift Guide”
“I’ve encountered plenty of cocktail books that include the occasional syrup or tincture made from homegrown herbs, but Slow Drinks goes lightyears beyond this, offering recipes dependent as much on their locally foraged modifiers as they are their base spirit.” - Drink Hacker, “Book Review: Slow Drinks”
Danny Childs trained as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist studying the traditional medicinal uses of plants in the Amazon rainforest. Back home in Southern New Jersey, he now runs the standard-setting beverage program at The Farm and Fisherman Tavern, a locavore restaurant in the Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill.
